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Bookmark on DeliciousPublished: Sep. 26, 2011
Words: 43632 (approximate)
Language: English
Ebook short description
A cycle of short stories about rural Texas spanning 75 years. Some of the stories are funny, some poignant, and some… just strange. Between the stories are fictional newspaper clippings that capture the lives of small-town Texans.Extended description
A cycle of twenty-two short stories about rural Texas spanning 75 years. Some of the stories are funny, some poignant, and some… just strange.Between the stories are eleven fictional newspaper clippings that capture the lives of small-town Texans.
"Those of us who have heard Tom Doyal perform his alternately hilarious and poignant stories have felt too long like members of a giddy but too small cult. We have been looking for an effective way to let the world know about Tom Doyal's vibrant, boisterous talent. Now his stories are online, and read by him, and it's easy to tell that he is a writer whose affection for his hardscrabble subject matter is boundless, contagious, and true to the patch of earth he knows so much about." — Clay Smith, Literary Director, Texas Book Festival
Tags
texas, humor, short stories, small town, storytelling, storyteller, texana, texas voicesAvailable ebook reading formats
Single purchase gains access to all formats. How to download ebooks to e-reading devices and apps.| Format | Full Book | Sample First 20% |
|---|---|---|
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| Online Reading (JavaScript, experimental, buggy) | Buy | View sample |
| Kindle (.mobi for Kindle devices and Kindle apps) | Buy | Download sample |
| Epub (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others) | Buy | Download sample |
| PDF (good for reading on PC, or for home printing) | Buy | No sample available |
| RTF (readable on most word processors) | Buy | No sample available |
| LRF (Use only for older model Sony Readers that don't support .epub) | Buy | Download sample |
| Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices) | Buy | Download sample |
| Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting) | Buy | No sample available |
| Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page) | Buy | No sample available |
Reviews
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Review by:
Thomas Smith
on Dec. 30, 2011 :
Wonderful use of the English language - Texas version. Humorous, but every character seems alive.
(reviewed the day of purchase)
Review by:
Helen Ginger
on Nov. 15, 2011 :
I had no idea what to expect of a book with the title of Mambo Panties.
Even after reading Mambo Panties, I’m not sure what genre label to give it. It’s like going to your local History Center and reading snippets from a time long ago. It’s fiction yet the news pieces and tales feel like they were written by real people and then collected in a book to share with today’s generation. Both the stories and the news clippings are personal, relevant even today, and so close I felt as though I knew these people and the wind carried their whispers.
As an example, I’ll talk about one piece called “Housekeeping Kit.” Agnes, now living in a place called Golden Oaks, remembers back to her wedding day and the start of her life with Houston. This story, only seven and a half pages long, takes you through their wedding and the first few days of their life together as they furnish the house Monroe Felps “made them as a wedding present of one year’s rent with the customary terms for farming on shares the next year” and which Agnes and her sisters had cleaned up, including killing four rattlesnakes. By the end of just those few pages, I wanted to know more about their lives and what the future held for them.
So many of these stories would make wonderful full length character stories. But they don’t have to be. As they are, they’re snippets of lives long ago that are still relevant today. Some of the stories are longer than the one I talked about here. Some, especially the newspaper clippings, are quite short, maybe only a paragraph or two. Together, the stories and news clippings give this fiction book a feeling of non-fiction.
Mambo Panties is quiet, yet compelling … old, yet relevant … and intriguing to read, time and time again.
I give Mambo Panties a rating of Hel-of-a-Read.
(reviewed long after purchase)